Join Erika Lincoln for an introduction to her residency with the Climate Change Office at the City of Winnipeg Planning, Property & Development Department. She will then, introduce Visiting Artists: Victoria Scott and Scott Kildall. They will speak about their collaborative and individual art practices with data visualization and public intervention to help engage citizens with their cities. The duo will conclude by introducing the Refill Project workshop taking place March 27 & 28.

This talk is the first event presented as part of Erika Lincoln’s ongoing residency with the Climate Change Office at the City of Winnipeg Planning, Property & Development Department and she will introduce her residency projects.

Erika Lincoln was selected as the Artist-in-Residence with the City of Winnipeg through the Winnipeg Arts Council Public Art Program. Collaborating with the Planning Department’s Office of Climate Change, Lincoln’s project augments public engagement opportunities for citizens of Winnipeg to learn more about climate change and the City. The Refill Project will be the first in a series of events organized by the artist.

The Winnipeg Arts Council Public Art Program’s Artist-in-Residence Program integrates artists and their ideas into City facilities to engage citizens in civic processes through art.

Led by San Francisco-based artists Victoria Scott and Scott Kildall, this 2-day, hands-on workshop will physically re-imagine the recently closed Freshwater Institute Library through a collaborative process of creative reconstruction.

In the fall of 2013, the Canadian Government dismantled this world-famous library in what many called a political act of “libricide”. Thousands of physical books containing scientific research on climate change and water studies were recycled or given to private citizens and companies by government officials. There was no oversight by the librarians themselves and no catalogue of what was in the collection. Many considered this library to be a valuable repository of research material, dating back to the 1850s.

In the workshop, we will reconstruct the library by both by re-imagining the contents and also creating an architecture of future libraries. We will ask questions of the need for a physical archive in this digital age of near universal internet. Physical records don’t suffer the fate of digital obscurity, but they do raise questions of ease-of-use. Finally, from an architectural standpoint, what would this library look like? Will we have robotic-retrieval mechanisms, soothing reading rooms and face-to-face discussions? During the course of the workshop, we will make papercraft models, digital 3D models, scanned drawings and hand-drawn techniques, which will create a collaborative vision of this library could be.

This workshop is made possible by Erika Lincoln, Artist-in-Residence with the City of Winnipeg Planning, Property & Development Department and through funding from the Winnipeg Arts Council. Collaborating with the city’s department’s Office of Climate Change, Lincoln’s project augments public engagement opportunities for citizens of Winnipeg to learn more about climate change and the City. The Refill Project will be the first in a series of events organized by the artist.